Plan Your Trip Times Picks

The Great Boardwalk Towns of Jersey

By JOE SHARKEY;

Published: August 4, 1991

I AM not sure what dark psychological forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution prompted that first Victorian entrepreneur to gaze over the undulating sand dunes and misty surf and decide that here would be just the place to put up a hotel and a Tilt a Whirl, and lay down wooden planks between the two to keep customers from getting sand in their shoes.

But a hundred years later, the legacy thrives in the Great Boardwalk Towns of New Jersey, those uniquely American celebrations of the excessive and the egalitarian. Today, when much of the seashore is increasingly inhospitable to short-notice or short-term visitors, with "Keep Out -- Private Beach" signs sprouting like dune grass, the boardwalk towns are not a bad place to spend the occasional day or weekend at the beach.

The Great Boardwalk Towns are confined essentially to that section of the coast to which the Founding Fathers would have repaired on the steamy July weekend after they signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, if they had had cars but were unwilling to pay the toll to Coney Island.

There are, of course, lesser boardwalks, notably those austere, discreet wooden walkways laid between the dunes in certain exclusive shore towns in Maine, Massachusetts, Long Island and even on the Jersey coast. There is nothing discreet about the Great Boardwalks; they are the very apotheosis of the garish -- long wood promenades at least 40 feet in width, along one side of which are jammed businesses and diversions consisting partly of the following:

Piers arching into the sea supporting roller coasters costing more than $2 million;

Along the 125-mile stretch of Jersey seashore, the northernmost of the Great Boardwalk Towns is Asbury Park, a resort that developed in the late 1800's as an alternative to its then vice-ridden neighbor, Long Branch, the town where President James Garfield died from gunshot wounds and thus became the first, but by no means only, local habitue to be dispatched at the hand of a disappointed office seeker. Long Branch, alas, has been improved beyond historical recognition, the only vestige of its boardwalk heyday now being a camp of diehard pinball arcades near a rock joint where a group called LaBamba & the Hubcaps was packing them in one recent night.

Five miles south, the jackhammers of gentrification are just starting to rattle over the hiss of the surf at Asbury Park, whose milelong gray expanse of boardwalk seems suspended between two worlds. An ambitious redevelopment plan (slow in getting off the mark but, local businessmen insist, moving along) will remove the hulking old casino amusement center and other boardwalk claptrap, replacing them with new pavilions, condos and upscale shops. But that hasn't happened yet. The baseball batting cages are still on the scene, and Asbury Park still qualifies as a boardwalk town. The boardwalk is straddled by the huge ornamental Convention Hall and the adjacent Paramount Theater; I wandered in recently to watch a crowd of people enjoying a national boccie ball championship in the shady arcade. On another afternoon music echoed from the classic seven-rank Kilgen Theater Organ inside Convention Hall, where there are free summer concerts on Sunday at 3 P.M. "The organist takes requests," said Art Sherman, who helps to arrange the programs.

Not far away, at a breezy boardwalk bistro called Caffe e Dolce, you can have lunch or cappuccino at outside tables and watch the sailboats bob beyond the waves. It's also the local gossip center and a good place to pick up information on musical events, including the establishment's own jazz program.

Music has always been an important part of life at Asbury. During the Big Band era, bands like those of Glenn Miller and Harry James were regulars here. In the 60's, the Rolling Stones and the Doors played Convention Hall, inspiring a kid from the suburbs named Bruce Springsteen, whose first album was titled "Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J." The Stone Pony club, where Springsteen and the E Street Band, as well as Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, started, is still thriving just off the boardwalk, on Second Avenue.